[Via Gizmodo]

Ha. I noticed the password “Gateway” and “Compaq” in the list. Gee, I wonder how they came up with those.

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night while having a terrible dream. I dreamt that the game-updater no longer worked. This meant I had no way to get fixes and improvements to my users. I couldn’t even give them a new updater that worked (*well, I could, but only if they tracked me down). I calmed myself down and managed to get back to sleep.

Today I had to get out a fix for a bug that wouldn’t let players load some of their saved-games. I put together a fix, and tried to put out an update. What happens? The game-updater no longer worked. With the recent change that allowed the game to use foreign character sets, I had inadvertently broke the updater. It took me two frantic hours to figure out what was going wrong, and I came up with a way to work around the updater bug. At least it wasn’t irrevocably broken.

Yup, these are the kinds of nightmares that software developers have.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor and game developer, Jesse Schell, talks about game development. He has some interesting ideas. My comments below the video.

I have to admit that I’ve been somewhat mystified by some of the things that have become popular in the past few years. For example, if I’d heard the idea for Chat Roulette, I would’ve just thought, “Well, video conferencing with random match-ups. I don’t know that it will go anywhere. It might languish in obscurity.” But, it was huge.

Recently, I went and looked up some of the highest-subscribed video channels on YouTube, just to see if I could find some interesting stuff. I was shocked by the low-level of talent and entertainment value. I’m still mystified by it. My only guess is that those video channels are heavily followed by kids in the twelve to fifteen year-old range, and it’s just not something that I’m going to understand. (Case in point: Ray William Johnson, who has the fourth highest number of channel views this month, and routinely gets over two million views per video.) Again, I’m just mystified.

One thing I’ve noticed about inventors and businesses over the past few years is that lots attempted ideas that never go anywhere. Even people who have become very successful end up with lots and lots of failed ideas – both before and after their one or two successful ideas. Sometimes it seems like a crapshoot, and even the experts can’t predict what ideas are going to be successful. They just try one idea after another, picking themselves up after each failure, until they stumble on something that gets popular.

One of the things I was thinking about recently was the concept of “fail quickly”. It’s a phrase that entrepreneurs use to describe trying something, seeing if it works, and if it isn’t going to work, then you want to fail quickly and get on to the next thing. I can understand the logic behind that – given the fact that most ideas will end up failing.

In the second part of his talk (beginning around 18:30), he discusses the idea of getting points for doing different things in life. This idea just seems horrible. Fortunately, I don’t think it would catch-on (but, as I mentioned earlier, I could be wrong). Not only would it allow companies to create a kind of virtual carrot in front of us to drive our behavior, but the sheer amount of thought that would go into capturing these points would deprive us of an existence deeper than simple consumerism. What he’s describing is a situation where people’s minds are preoccupied with reaching corporate-constructed goals.

This is a pretty clever commercial.

I was trying to figure out how they were determining your body-position from two controllers. From the videos I’ve seen, they do a pretty good job of it.

I can understand how they could figure out the controller’s position in 3d space, based on a 2d-camera image and the size of each of those balls from the camera’s perspective (which gives them a distance to the camera). I can also understand that they can use inverse kinematics to figure out a person’s arm position. But, as far as I can tell, if you hold the controller to your chest and take a step forward, the computer should perceive that your body is in it’s original location and you have your arms outstretched. Unless I’m missing something, they aren’t tracking the location of your body. Interesting stuff nevertheless. Also, I’m glad the system doesn’t suffer from the same cheats that you can do with the Wii motion controller.

This is a pretty cool video. Not only is it impressive technology, but the idea of overcoming language barriers is also pretty cool. The military has been very interested in this kind of stuff — so soldiers in the field can communicate with natives. I wonder how long until call-centers are outsourced to non-English-speaking countries. I could also see it being used for auto-generating transcripts for things like podcasts, which could be useful for searching.

Today, I got a gift card for my upcoming birthday. Before opening it, I took a look at the fees on the packaging, and was pretty shocked:

So, for a $50 gift card, there’s a $5 fee just to purchase the card. Then, a $2 fee per month? If I didn’t use the card for a year, they’d count $29 profit on a $55 purchase. And if I forgot about the card for two years and a month, the entire $55 would be pure profit for the credit card company. Amazing.

I really like Tony Hsieh’s approach to business. Here’s an mp3 to his talk at the Web 2.0 conference:

In this presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh talks about his first business selling pizza in college, starting Link Exchange after college, and how he eventually ended up leading Zappos as the CEO. Tony discusses how his experience at Link Exchange influenced him to focus on corporate culture as a top priority, and why he thinks culture is so important to a company’s future growth and success.

Tony talks about the internal vision of Zappos not just to be an Internet footware merchant, but to be a brand that is known for an excellent customer experience. He goes on to list a number of specific techniques that the company uses to enhance customer service, and explains why he thinks that the telephone is still one of the best branding devices available.

[via IT Conversations]